ORLEANS, IND. — When Baron P. Hill, the local congressman, endorsed Barack Obama last week, his surprise announcement was greeted with a roof-raising cheer from more than 12,000 people crowded into the basketball arena at Indiana University.
"Can we work together to change the tenor and tone of politics in Washington?" Hill hollered, and the crowd of Obama supporters joined in: "Yes, we can!"
But Donald Bobbitt was puzzled by Hill's decision. The 70-year-old retiree likes Hill and helped elect the Democrat to one of the most competitive congressional seats in the country. Obama, however, is "too much Islamic," Bobbitt said a day after the announcement, as he manned the amateur radio exhibit at the annual Dogwood Festival in Orleans, about 40 miles south of the Bloomington campus. "We don't need that in this country." (Obama actually is a practicing Christian.)
Voters in Indiana and North Carolina go the polls today in the biggest day of balloting left on the waning presidential primary campaign calendar. Most have little at risk.
But for members of Congress, who are among the superdelegates holding the outcome of the Democratic contest in their hands, the stakes are more personal. For those facing tough reelection fights -- in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida and here in Indiana -- political survival could depend on their choice and on which candidate, Clinton or Obama, leads the ticket in November.
"It certainly makes a difference" in closely fought districts, said James E. Campbell, political science chairman at the State University of New York at Buffalo and an expert on presidential coattails. He says that a candidate sharing the ballot with a strong presidential nominee can pick up a substantial number of votes. "Somebody unpopular at the top of the ticket can actually cost you votes," Campbell said.
That could be decisive here in southeastern Indiana, where the seat in Hill's 9th Congressional District has gone back and forth -- Democrat, Republican, Democrat -- three times in the last six years.
Starting in the liberal bastion of Bloomington, the district meanders south to the Kentucky border and east to Ohio. Small towns dot its winding roads; some consist of little more than a gas station, a small grocer, some grazing cows and a few scattered homes.
As the rolling countryside opens up, accents flatten and broaden into a soft Southern twang. The feel is much closer to Appalachia than Indianapolis, the state capital, which is less than 100 miles away.
